Fanfare for the Uncommon Piano

By DIANE COLE

Published: June 6, 2003

''I Love a Piano,'' Irving Berlin's anthem to the keyboard, has been music to my ears ever since I began tickling the ivories at the age of 8. But New York's love affair with the keyboard has been going on a lot longer, as several museums, a landmark showroom and this country's most famous piano factory all attest. In addition, gala concerts at Carnegie Hall this weekend commemorate the 150th anniversary of the founding, in New York, of Steinway & Sons.

But while that venerable piano manufacturer may be the best-known symbol of the instrument in New York, there are other places connected to the piano that can delight the casual visitor and surprise even the connoisseur. The best place to begin exploring the piano's extraordinary popularity in the United States and its advent as a status symbol in this country is at the Museum of the American Piano, at 291 Broadway in Lower Manhattan.

Entering this compact, basement-level institution, founded in 1984, is like walking through an auditory time machine and hearing the unusual plunk and plink of keyboards made 200 years ago. Many once-popular piano makers displayed here -- Knabe, Chickering, Osborn, Geib and Nunns, Clark & Company, among others -- no longer sound familiar because they have gone out of business.

But more than a century ago hundreds of manufacturers proliferated across the country. Piano ownership conveyed a sense of middle-class refinement and domesticity, and such was the demand that by 1850 about 60 piano manufacturers existed in the New York area alone, making it an important local industry that provided factory work for new immigrants and created jobs for salesmen, tuners, movers and music teachers. By the end of the 19th century, about one in six New Yorkers worked in some piano-related job, says Kalman Detrich, the museum's founder and executive director. (Mr. Detrich or an associate will provide a guided tour if you call in advance.)

As you walk through the two chronologically arranged galleries, don't be surprised if you find yourself rubbing your eyes as you count only 61, or in some cases 73 or 75 or 85, cream-colored keys on instruments of earlier eras, rather than the standard 88 of pianos today. One eerily glistening keyboard has keys made from mother-of-pearl. The foot pedals are not always where you expect them to be, either; on one instrument there is one each on opposite ends of the piano. In some instances, you might not even realize that the once-fashionable but now obscure-looking piece of furniture before you is a parlor piano of yore.

One such oddity is the giraffe piano, essentially an upright with a grand's harp-shaped frame with strings standing atop it. These pianos became popular in the 1880's, promising to provide the resonant sound and high-class décor of a grand while taking up much less space. One catch: no stand for sheet music. Another 19th-century space saver is displayed: a piano whose music desk folds up and disappears, allowing the piano to masquerade as an exquisitely carved rosewood cabinet with no telltale keyboard, pedals or strings in sight.

Still another obsolete style well represented here is the so-called square piano, whose actual shape more closely resembles an elongated rectangle. One intricately carved 1815 example is supported by six fluted legs. No wonder this style's massive size, compared with the more compact upright, led to the square's extinction by the end of the 19th century.

A 1920's Player Piano

On his tour Mr. Detrich saves the most novel item for last: a 1920's Nickelodeon Company player piano that also encases a mechanically operated tambourine, cymbal, bass drum, triangle and accordion.

Although the museum also offers examples of French, German and British pianos, the emphasis on American ones highlights the fact that the piano was the first American product to supersede its European counterparts, Mr. Detrich says. The turning point, he explains, came in 1850, when the American-made Chickering piano beat out European competitors to win a gold medal in Paris.

The piano industry also presaged today's trend toward globalization, Mr. Detrich said. Exotic woods like rosewood originated in South America, ivory was imported from Africa, felt for the hammers came from New Zealand and Australia, and shellac and finishing materials were made in Asia.

More piano history -- and additional exotic pianos -- can be seen in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's musical-instruments collection, which houses the oldest piano in existence, built in 1720 by the Italian instrument maker Bartolomeo Cristofori. In outward shape, Cristofori's unornamented, slim-cased, fragile-looking wooden instrument with yellowed keys resembles a harpsichord. But his interior music-making mechanism was revolutionary, essentially replacing the harpsichord's string-plucking quills with fast-striking hammers.

The keyboard on this piano, though only four and a half octaves, could produce a wider range of sound, high and low, and could play, as suggested by the instrument's new name -- the gravicembalo col piano e forte -- soft and loud. By the end of the 18th century, five octaves had become standard, and pianos were so popular that wealthy music lovers were commissioning ornate, custom-made instruments. Around 1790, for example, Ferdinand Hofmann of Vienna built an elegant cherry grand, with delicately carved arcades above an ebony-and-bone keyboard, and a music rack with a tall Gothic-arch window design.